Popular workplace collaboration service Slack Technologies Inc. suffered a worldwide outage today that disrupted the service for about six hours.

The outage started at about 10 a.m. EDT with some users unable to log into the service. Other users who were logged in couldn’t send or edit messages and in some cases channels were displaying a blank screen, according to Bleeping Computer.

“Some users may be experiencing slowness with Slack in the desktop, browser and mobile at this time,” Slack wrote in a support message at 10:05 a.m. “The issue is impacting sending messages and troubles with API calls. Our team is looking into it and we’ll follow up with more updates in 30 minutes.”

An hour later, Slack was still experiencing issues: “We’re still working to get to the bottom of the performance issues that users might be experiencing.”

Adding a veil of mystery to the outage, the 1:41 p.m. update reads “We’re seeing signs of improvement but we’re not out of the woods yet and users may still be seeing slow performance.”

Slack, while not providing details on what was causing the issues, to its credit gave ongoing updates. At 4:41 p.m., Slack wrote that it believed the service should have been working as of 1:41 p.m. but it was “continuing efforts on our side to investigate and ensure this trouble doesn’t happen again.”

What caused the outage is open to speculation. There seems to be no obvious sign of a distributed denial-of-service attack, although a cyberattack of some sort can’t be ruled out. It could have been a case on an internal issue and it wouldn’t be the first time, Slack having previously suffered an outage in August.

The outage, in the age of COVID-19, does highlight how far the world has changed when it comes to remote working and reliance on tools such as Slack and competitor Microsoft Teams. Slack itself briefly trended on Twitter, according to data from Trends24, giving some idea as to how popular the service has become.

Others on Twitter had some fun with the outage. Although any site suffering an outage may disrupt work, people can still see a lighter side.

When Slack is down. pic.twitter.com/LAA7G4eis9

— Ad Age (@adage) October 5, 2020

all of us on slack today pic.twitter.com/UFvmEXgGJo

— Casey Mendoza (@CaseyMdoza) October 5, 2020

slack down during remote work pic.twitter.com/B4B3zAzLQ4

— Chelsea McDonnell 🗳 (@chelsea_lynn_) October 5, 2020

Image: Pxfuel